Half of the female STEM faculty in the US were hired over more qualified men
twitter.com
twitter.com
"This suggests that preference for women among identically-qualified applicants found in experimental studies and in audits does not extend to women whose credentials are even slightly weaker than male counterparts. Thus these data give no support to the twin claims that weaker males are chosen over stronger females or weaker females are hired over stronger males."
To me this reads like they concluded that affirmative action (bias towards women among identically qualified candidates) is not occuring at the expense of merit.
As long as they can do the work, hire them!
The key word is equity.
I reject any companionship to men as a group, just for the record.
The important question is not "who is more highly qualified" it's contextual: at the payscale we hire for, and the roles we need filled, from the abundantly capable candidates who do we actually... WANT.
I don't have a role in hiring any more, but from qualified candidates I've hired for diversity and I'd do it again without question. I know of companies who hire alternating men and women to maintain equity. They're successful. Domingos appears to want to imply this cannot be true or equitable.
If it's measured solely by grant applications and peer review publishing, remember bad actors score highly in both. Perhaps Domingos forgets the pastoral quality of staff in a department? Does he think this has no importance? Women students need women faculty to become successful.
In the 1960s and 1970s the compsci field was not skewed as much as it has been since. Why is this?
I am told by Iranian friends, reliable ones, that 75% of students in engineering are women. What would Domingos expect faculty ratios to be, in Iran?
Looking to Iran for any comparison regarding the equitable treatment of women is beyond absurd. Let us know when honor killings and genital mutilation and child marriages have been dealt with, and maybe then we can start including Iran in discussions about how to treat women.
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With regards to the rest - If I'm paying for an education, I don't give a flying rat's ass about how much sensitivity and care has been put into achieving the correct ratios of skin color, gender, sexuality, or really any other factor than the qualifications of the person from which in learning. I want the best teachers.
Social justice issues are cultural. Trying to arbitrarily and artificially correct such problems with bureaucratic checklists is a tragic and infuriating response, often introducing whole new categories of harm. All they accomplish is the selection of one person over another based on their race, gender, or sexuality, regardless of the hard work and effort expended as an individual human being. No matter how you slice it, that is a deeply wrong and troubling mindset.
Race and gender and sexuality aren't knowledge, competence, capability, or character. They aren't qualifications. Treating them as such is social justice theater.
It isn't just an infuriating response, it is racism and sexism. There is institutional sexism because they implement it. Your motivation behind your deed is irrelevant.
That said, it isn't entirely clear to me that the facts are as stated. There appear to be some studies that support the idea that sex is being used as a preference, but I don't see any support for the linked tweet's apparent position that the preference is so strong as to result in clearly disparate outcomes half the time.
Domingos' cited support:
- "preference for women among identically-qualified applicants found in experimental studies and in audits does not extend to women whose credentials are even slightly weaker than male counterparts" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4611984/
- "men and women faculty members from all four fields preferred female applicants 2:1 over identically qualified males" but no analysis regarding more-qualified males. https://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360
- With identical CVs, women chosen 2:1 over men. (Silent as to outcomes when men have the more qualified CVs.) https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/women-twice-as-likely-to...
- (No relevant summary available) https://www.nap.edu/catalog/12062/gender-differences-at-crit...
- "We find the evidence for recent sex discrimination–when it exists–is[,] occasionally, bias in favor of women." https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/108/8/3157.full.pdf
2) How am I breaking the guidelines? "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups."
The person writing the twitter post is the author of "The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World" so I believe his comment does follow the On-Topic criteria as he is a renowned person in the science community.
The tweet is not even a story, it’s a flatly divisive statement with nothing to back it up. It makes claims about affirmative action, so it is political, and IMO it is also flamebait. Starting a flame war doesn’t appear to be your intent based on your other comment, but linking directly to that tweet gives no surrounding context to prevent one. (I’m not sure more context would prevent one, but it might help.)
From what I read of the Twitter “thread,” the original post went up and sat for a day or so, then someone else finally posted some references and the first guy retweeted them. Other HN posts have already said they don’t support the original tweet. Which seems to be the answer you were looking for.
If the original tweet and the eventual references had all been rolled up into a digestible blog post, I would have been less likely to flag it—even though I don’t think HN is the right place for it.
My take on the post has nothing to do with you personally. If you had made the same reply without mentioning that you were the OP, I would not have known and would have responded mostly the same way. Probably less charitably TBH, since I wouldn’t have seen your other comment.